Early D.A. Endorsements: Cops, Clubs, Pols, and Judge Judy

May 12, 2009

At PolitickerNY, Azi Paybarah sees Manhattan D.A. candidate Richard Aborn pursuing an “Early-Endorsement Strategy.” His office certainly sends out plenty such notices: in the past few weeks we’ve been alerted to his endorsements by the Broadway Democrats and the Gramercy Stuyvesant Independent Democrats, Assemblymembers Jonathan Bing, Richard Gottfried, and Deborah Glick, and state senator Eric Adams. (Former NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton has also endorsed.)

Paybarah says the important endorsements have yet to be dispensed, but hey, Aborn got us to write about him, didn’t he? We’ve previously written that Cyrus Vance, Jr. has the edge in the race, being the presumed choice of current D.A. Morgenthau, but Morgenthau has been slow to make a definitive statement, though Vance does have Betsy Gotbaum and David Dinkins, among others, in his corner. Leslie Crocker Snyder has the backing of many cop organizations — she was a famously ferocious prosecutor back in the day — and Judge Judy. Nobody polls these things, so we can only wonder what Democratic primary voters make of of them. Probably not much, yet.

Today the Daily News considers whether recency of trial experience means anything. Vance and Snyder, who last argued cases in 2007, understandably say yes; Aborn’s spokesperson says managing a law firm and “supervising scores of attorneys and preparing them for trial, which is what DAs… do,” means more (Aborn last argued in 1992). We’ll call it a wash. None of the three seems to be letting the others get ahead of them on publicity — the recent publicity over the 30-year-old Etan Patz case found them all eagerly weighing in — so the probable result will be that one of them will make a fatal error, and the other two will death-cage-match to a resolution.